County mental‑health workers and advocates urge board to protect IOP services, create community task force

Therapists and community advocates asked the Alameda County Board of Supervisors to protect intensive outpatient mental‑health services and to create a community‑led task force to guide system changes.

"AHS's IOP services are an essential level of care for those in this county with severe and persistent mental illness," said Laura Wall, a therapist at Alameda Health System's Fairmont Hospital intensive outpatient program, flagging an apparent overhead increase for her program that she said would make budgeting impossible and could threaten services.

John Lindsay Poland of the American Friends Service Committee asked the board to agendize a resolution establishing a Brown Act, community‑led task force modeled on Los Angeles' Measure J implementation. Poland said the Los Angeles model paired strong community representation with data analysis and academic and philanthropic involvement to "design a new way of making care first and jail last." Megan Schwartz, a resident and member of Decarcerated Alameda County, told the board the resolution would formalize community engagement and help ensure that people with lived experience shape the next phase.

Speakers and some supervisors said the county needs better data to translate proposals into concrete capacity: how many beds, what types of facilities, and whether current proposals address racial disparities in incarceration and jail‑based mental‑health care. "There was no data presented on what is the waiting list or waiting time," Poland said, urging staff to provide the missing figures.

Several supervisors thanked speakers and asked staff to return with options. Supervisor Miley said she might abstain on proclamations that venture too far into international or unfamiliar policy areas without staff analysis; others suggested a short board policy on when to take positions on matters outside direct county oversight.

Next steps: advocates asked the board to place the resolution on a future agenda; board members did not take immediate formal action on the task‑force proposal during the meeting.